Arsenic and Old Lace: Madness in the Family

It’s hard to see why Grant was so embarrassed by his Mortimer. He claimed the broadness was the problem. “I simply cannot do this kind of comedy,” he complained to Capra. As a young actor, he had closely studied movie comedians, and his favorites were Stan Laurel and Harry Langdon, who were rarely frenetic, more like the still centers of slapstick chaos. One supposes that, having built up a reputation for suavity, the former Archibald Leach might have been disconcerted by the prospect of spending a whole movie in a state of perspiring panic. But that, fortunately, is his problem, not ours.

In his book on Grant, Richard Schickel defends Grant’s and Capra’s bold choices, asking, “What’s a man supposed to do when he finds bodies buried all over his maiden aunts’ house? Arch an ironic eyebrow?” The playing is entirely appropriate to a character in such circumstances in a farce, even if, as Schickel concedes, it is “not Grant’s most urbane performance.”

Farces on the big screen often look, well, stagy: a lot of running about in overlit rooms. But Arsenic benefits from the handy visual style provided by the mock-horror-noir angle. Capra and cinematographer Sol Polito devise some thrilling chiaroscuro, shooting scenes by match light (one assumes Polito must be enhancing the glow with a spotlight, but the trick is undetectable) or using only the light coming under a door. Farces are all about fear—typically the fear of getting caught—but this one is so steeped in panic-terror that it can justify all manner of stylistic brio; it is Capra’s most flamboyant job since The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932).

Polito was a Warners house cameraman, with whom Capra had never worked before and never would again; an all-rounder at home with swashbucklers, musicals, gangster pics; a fellow Sicilian. He seems to have adjusted happily to Capra’s idiosyncratic approach—the multiple cameras, the hectic pacing—and helped carved out these distinctive moments: tiny pools of light in stygian ink-scapes. When the malignant Jonathan lays out his plans to Dr. Einstein, squatting on the stairs, Jonathan is merely the huge shadow of a head, dwarfing the doc, who squirms between the banisters as if gripped by enormous chopsticks. This kind of expressionism is a throwback to early talking pictures and even silents—Capra’s technique was dazzling but always somehow fixed in some earlier period. All these tricks would come back, hard, when film noir took off after the war—too bad Capra never fully embraced that genre.

Much of the film’s freneticism comes from Capra playing the dialogue of one group over the actions of someone else, so we get two stories at once. Delicate work, as it’s axiomatic that you may tell only one joke at a time. Capra somehow keeps multiple comic balls in the air simultaneously, staggering the payoffs so they don’t crush one another. He’d started shooting with multiple cameras in 1930, in order, he claimed, to get all of Barbara Stanwyck’s angles in one take, since she was never as good repeating herself. (But wasn’t everything shot with multiple cameras in 1930? Capra’s big idea was to keep doing it after everyone else stopped.) This approach allows the actors to take their scenes at breakneck speed, yelling over one another if necessary, everything captured at once with perfect continuity.

Capra was permitted to borrow three of the play’s most lovable leads: Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the poisoning sisters, and John Alexander as delusional Teddy. And Warners supplied studio mainstays such as Priscilla Lane (captivating little punkin), Lorre (doleful imp), and Jack Carson (clod). This talent pool was freshened with the likes of Edward Everett Horton—all too clearly whittled from a parsnip, a study in twitchy dithering—and James Gleason, an exasperated shovel.

Hull, also admirable in Harvey (1950)—another classic play-film that was more popular with audiences than critics—brings a unique daintiness to the role of Abby, a tiptoe prance transforming her hefty torso into a bobbing balloon. Adair, who plays Martha, had been billed alongside Grant in vaudeville in Rochester, New York, back in 1922, and nursed the teenage tumbler through a bout of rheumatic fever. He remembered her fondly and was delighted to perform alongside her again.

The aunts’ sweetness is both the disguise that enables them to function as successful poisoners, unsuspected for years, and completely genuine. Their only vice, apart from homicide, is a genteel bigotry—they’re saddened by the way their Brooklyn neighborhood has changed, and horrified at the thought of Mr. Spenalzo, with his invented Italianate name, being buried in their cellar with the more respectably Anglo-Saxon kills. I can only imagine the immigrant Capra chortling to himself at this polite middle-class prejudice.

Mostly, Arsenic follows its playscript closely, save for the start and finish. The opening baseball riot is part of a witty intro narrated by title cards, incorporating snatches of newsreel reality, something nearly every Capra film of the previous decade had also done. It’s an approved way of “opening out” a play—rather than blasting into a dozen locations, destroying all those careful Aristotelian unities you just bought, you start outdoors in the world of cinema, then slide into the play and basically stay there.

This trompe l’oeil wonderland makes a marvelous backdrop, quite convincing yet not too real, for the sinister Brewster family saga. Charles Addams had begun his macabre series of cartoons for the New Yorker, detailing the antics of a nameless clan of gothic creeps, and the same sense of grim twinkle sparkles through Joseph Kesselring’s play and the Epsteins’ adaptation. Nazism was about to make the pseudoscience of eugenics go badly out of style, but anxiety about criminal bloodlines, chromosomal psychopathy, and bad seeds was still endemic. The theme underlies You Can’t Take It with You (1938), more subtly and benignly, but madness and nervous breakdowns and suicide are near obsessions with Capra, despite his sunny reputation. Perhaps it was Mortimer’s anxiety about his mental inheritance that attracted the director in the first place. (His biographer Joseph McBride notes that he described his mother as “nuts.” And she made wine in the basement too.) Though Capra always insisted that it was the chance to make something unserious for once that really seduced him.

He picked the right story, a taut farce with no redeeming social content. The structural precision and big laughs hold it together in lieu of thematic weightiness. The film handles serial murder with absurd delicacy, barely showing a glimpse of a corpse, though the sisters’ trophy cabinet of gentlemen’s hats may provoke a mild shudder in this era, when we’re all experts on the behavioral patterns of serial killers and can register this once-quaint detail as uncomfortably authentic.

In the final weeks of shooting, two major events took place: Grant finally got engaged to Hutton, and the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor. Undoubtedly the second event cast a pall over the production, but it doesn’t seem to show. Grant finished his work on Arsenic five days after the attack, and on the same day Capra joined the Signal Corps. But, luckily for us, he was granted a few weeks to finish postproduction on what would be his only black comedy, and one of the finest farces ever filmed.